


Let No Witness to My Weakness

by thelogicalghost



Series: After the End of the World [2]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Ensemble Cast, Gen, Post-Ragnarok, Reconciliation, Team Dynamics, Torture, Understanding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 11:25:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12680919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelogicalghost/pseuds/thelogicalghost
Summary: Clint Barton knows he's just one human Avenger in this massive war against Thanos. If Loki's on their side this time, he can deal with that. Really.[Focuses on Clint and Loki, not slash in the least. Mentions of all of the Avengers and some Guardians and Defenders, I only tagged characters who got more than a line.]





	1. Some Are Satin, Some Are Steel

Clint Barton had no magic, no special senses, and (as far as he knew) no extraordinary abilities, but he didn't need them to feel the tension that filled the conference room.

Despite being built to accommodate the entire roster of Avengers, the conference room at the upstate base was crowded. All currently active Avengers were there, but so were Steve Rodgers and his informal team. The sudden arrival of a being capable of destroying planets had put all internal disagreements on hold: the escapees had simply shown up in response to Tony's call, and even Hill had done nothing but note, in a very third-person, absent sort of manner, how planetwide emergencies took priority over damn near anything else. Hill was also very pointedly ignoring the fact that the Hulk was in the swimming pool, refusing to de-green and thus happily being distracted with pool noodles and a massive buffet table.

There were quite a few other non-Avengers, as well. The King of Wakanda sat at the table in his black outfit with his head and hands uncovered. Doctor Steven Strange somehow managed to lurk and loom simultaneously in one corner. Five individuals with various powers had introduced themselves as the Defenders, based out of New York City. (Well, four Defenders and a guy in a skull shirt who seemed friendly with them, so Clint was going to group them up anyhow.) And an utterly bizarre troupe of aliens, including a talking raccoon, who had all arrived in a spaceship, called themselves the Guardians of the Galaxy.

Clint thought that was a little tacky, but he wasn't about to argue with a sentient tree. Fortunately for the sanity of the Earth-born in the room, both the raccoon and tree had returned to their ship by the time serious discussion began.

Now Clint was watching carefully as the assembled heroes mingled (or didn't), taking turns to share intel concerning their own encounters with Thanos, his agents, or the Infinity Stones. The picture that was being painted wasn't looking good. Thanos had been pulling a lot of strings, and Clint, at least, couldn't see the bigger purpose that necessarily connected all the threads.

Not to mention, it was hard enough being a normal human in the Avengers on a regular day. Being a normal human in a room entirely full of people who could drop-kick him across a football field was something he had to deliberately and pointedly not think about.

Natasha appeared next to him as suddenly and silently as if she'd teleported. "We have a problem," she murmured too softly for anyone else to hear.

Clint didn't need to respond, and she didn't need to say anything else. Only a few of the occupants of the conference room noticed the two assassins leave in silence.

Only when they were well away from the conference room, nearly at the outside door, did she speak again. "Perimeter alarms were tripped. Got a very familiar energy signal." She brought up the reading on her cellphone and showed it to him.

Clint felt a chill run down his spine before he even consciously processed the information. "We're sure?"

"If it's a trick, it's a damn good one." She was watching him, he realized. He didn't blame her. "It hasn't moved much. Looks like he's waiting for something."

So much had happened since New York and that first alien invasion that Clint hadn't had reason to think about Loki in quite a while. And yet, still, green eyes flashed through his mind and he felt himself tensing involuntarily. Those eyes had been in his head. They'd ripped him apart and put him back together wrong. And yeah, he still woke up screaming sometimes from nightmares where it happened all over again.

Loki had been spotted among the enemy's forces. Clint wasn’t sure if he'd been hoping or fearing another showdown, but now it was here, and he and Nat had to deal with it.

"Okay," he said, and meant it. If there was one thing Clint was good at, it was compartmentalizing and locking away his emotions until the immediate situation was over. So he did that, and said, "Okay," again, with a nod. "Let’s find out."

And then, in a bizarre anticlimax, there wasn't any trick.

Natasha rounded the corner of the hanger bay, coming into line-of-sight of the energy signal with a gun in her hands and her wrist stingers ready to fire, and sure enough, Loki was standing in the long shadow of the building looking for all the world like a bored urbanite waiting for a train. He gave her a smile that was not at all as predatory as Clint remembered. "Agent Romanoff. Finally."

"Loki," Nat returned evenly. Not for the first time, Clint blessed Nat's ability to make any conversation sound utterly casual. "You expecting me?"

"Expecting someone. Your security machines cannot be so primitive as to have taken this long to detect my presence." He made a dismissive gesture toward the whole of the Avengers compound.

Nat paused mid-step, but since it was Natasha, she made it look natural. "You wanted us to find you."

"I assumed that this method might provoke a more intelligent and less instinctively violent reaction than, say, ringing the bell."

"And why would you want to do that?"

"Because I have intelligence, of course. If Agent Barton would be so good as to cease aiming at my head, perhaps we can rejoin your colorful little band of heroes and I'll share it."

 

* * *

 

Clint didn't un-knock his arrow until long after Natasha had secured Loki's wrists with a special set of cuffs Stark had designed to hold pretty much anyone except the Hulk. Loki had rolled his eyes, but hadn't protested. In fact, he'd even held out his wrists obligingly.

The two of them flanked him as they crossed the compound back to the main building. Clint and Nat had shared a long look that translated as, _I can't see why not_ , but that wasn't stopping Clint from keeping his focus on the alien god and his fingers in close proximity to his weapons.

Loki only met his gaze once, and then Clint avoided it and pretended he wasn't avoiding it.

Nat had tried to get the attention of one of the core Avengers before bringing Loki into the room, but unfortunately the attention she managed to get was Thor, and subtlety wasn't one of the Asgardian's strengths. "Loki!"

"What?" Half the room made visible movements toward weapons or into fighting stances.

Loki, of course, merely sauntered in and gave the room a brilliant smile. "My, how your little club has grown."

"Romanoff, please explain why this thing is standing in my conference room," Stark said in that particular tone of voice he tended to use when he was about to shoot something. "And why he's conscious."

"Do not be alarmed, friends," Thor insisted as he crossed the room to stand by his brother. Adopted brother, Clint remembered. "He is not here to harm us."

"I think we're going to have a hard time taking that on faith." That was Steve, sensible as always.

To Tony, Natasha said, "He says he wants to give us intel on Thanos."

"And you believed him?" Tony replied.

"That's Loki," a less familiar voice said. Clint had to turn to identify the speaker, a short, dark-haired woman from the New York City group. "I thought he led the army that destroyed midtown." At that, Clint could see her companions tense for battle as well.

"Much has changed," said Thor. "When Thanos intercepted our vessel, Loki allowed himself to be taken from the ship. He told me he would pretend to ally himself with the tyrant and act as a spy for us."

"While that would be wonderful, as Stark has suggested, what assurance do we have that you are not here to spy on us, instead?" said Vision.

"Perhaps you'll simply have to trust me," Loki said, though his grin suggested that he knew exactly how absurd his suggestion was.

"Not yet." Everyone turned: this was the first time Doctor Strange had spoken since he'd introduced himself at the meeting's start. Now his hawk-like gaze was fixed on the cuffed god, seeing something that only the magician could see. "Turn off your spell."

Almost everyone who had still been sitting was on their feet, but neither Loki nor Strange seemed to notice. Clint hadn’t seen any evidence that aliens could kill with a look any more than a human, but Loki seemed to be trying his hardest to murder Strange with a blazing stare. "You _dare_ , you presumptuous pretender of sorcery -"

"Loki." Thor's voice was low, but in the silence of the room, the emotion in the single word was clearly audible.

Green eyes darted to the thunder god. "You would ask me in front of these -"

" _Please_."

For a moment, Clint thought a fight was inevitable, that Loki would simply explode in a fit of rage and fury. But Thor was right: Loki must have changed since his last visit to Midgard, because he closed his eyes, let his shoulders slump a fraction, and illusion that Clint knew no normal person could sense melted away from Loki's skin.

Until now, Loki had looked much as he had in Clint's memory, polished and impeccable. Now, Clint had to admit that the man looked wrecked. His hair and clothing were mussed, torn, and stained with blood. His skin was so pale that the dark hollows under his eyes were more gray than black. Clint's trained eye caught deep bruises peeking out above the collar and around the cuffs on his wrists, suggesting prolonged and painful restraint. Extremely so, if Loki had the same rapid healing that Thor demonstrated.

There was a single sympathetic hiss, and an under-the-breath, "Fuck," that Clint didn't recognize, but otherwise the room was silent.

And then, without ceremony, Captain America walked over, pulled out a chair for the god of mischief, and sat back down in his own. And that, for a significant portion of the room, was that.

Not for all of the room, however. "I'm sorry, we're new here, well, newly returned, anyway, we're not up on recent events," said the most human-looking of the Guardians, a stocky man who reminded Clint of Tony in his ability to babble. "Who is this guy and what does this have to do with Thanos?"

"I have many names. In this realm I am known as Loki the Silver-Tongued, of Asgard," Loki said as he sat down. Despite his appearance, he moved with exactly the same smooth confidence as he had minutes before. Despite himself, Clint was impressed. "Some years ago, during my travels, I was captured by one of his lieutenants. Thanos demanded my obedience and aid in marching on my homeworld, where he believed there to be an Infinity Stone. I knew it to be elsewhere, and bargained with that information. I proposed a plan, which he approved, for traveling to this world, obtaining the Tesseract, and opening a portal for his army, through which the conquest of this part of the universe would begin."

"Which you tried. And failed," Stark interjected.

Loki's mouth twitched. "Truly. Though I had imagined when I'd proposed it that it wouldn't take quite so long to be defeated."

"I'm sorry, did he just say that he threw that fight? Do those words mean the same thing in Asgardian?"

"Tony," Steve sighed.

Loki helped the situation not at all by favoring Stark with a smile. "Certainly not. If I had deliberately lost, Thanos would have noticed. I simply came up with a plan so convoluted that I hadn't expected it to work." Then he rolled his eyes. "I allowed myself to be captured, told you the location of the device as plainly as I could, and then left it practically unguarded while the army funneled through a single chokepoint. Would you have preferred a map?"

"Arrogance may not be the most effective means by which to establish trust," T'Challa said before Tony could have an aneurysm. "I wish to hear the rest of your story before Mr. Stark loses his patience."

"My apologies," Loki said, only slightly insincere.

Clint glanced at Natasha to see that she'd raised an eyebrow, too. He knew she'd be watching him for subtext, tells, and body language, and he wondered what she made of the god of lies saying sorry, out loud. And why didn't Clint get a sorry? No, wait, Clint knew why. He was a mere mortal. Story of his life.

Loki was already continuing. "When our ship was confronted by Thanos' ship, I allowed myself to be captured and told him what he wanted to hear. I insisted that it was the fault of his commanders for failing to secure the portal device and underestimating the humans' response."

"Do you think he believes you?" That was Natasha, of course, asking the important question before the conversation got sidetracked.

Loki pursed his lips together. "To be entirely truthful, no, I don't think he trusts me."

"Shocking," Wilson muttered. Barnes elbowed him with his mechanized arm. "Ow!"

"But he believes I still desire vengeance against my brother and the mortals who stopped the first invasion, and that has allowed me access to a considerable amount of information."

That wasn't an exaggeration. Loki began unraveling massive swaths of data and the conference ground back into gear.

It was a long meeting. The sheer amount of players in the room meant that hearing everyone out took hours, and coming to decisions took even longer. Plans had to be made, adapted, discarded, and remade.

And during the entire length of it, Clint couldn't stop watching Loki. Something had shifted abruptly in his mind when the former mad villain had begun sharing intelligence. There was something too familiar about the whole thing, he realized, something he'd seen a hundred times before. He was watching an undercover agent put aside emotion and pain, take off their mask, and debrief. He's seen Natasha do it too many times to count, and when he caught her attention, he knew she was thinking the same thing.

"You okay?" she murmured, too soft for anyone but them.

"It's too weird," he murmured back, and she nodded.

"You don't have to stay," she said, but he shook his head. He wasn't speaking much, but he was still contributing, and this meeting was too important to abandon just because it was giving him the willies. He was fine. He could deal.

 

* * *

 

The sun had set and was depressingly close to rising again when the room had settled on a clear course of action, established the lines of communication, and even sketched out a few backup plans. The quiet buzz of wrap-up conversations filled the space. Clint noted with approval that some of the second-tier Avengers had made solid connections with various visitors. Superheroes, like spies, were often easiest to contact via friend of friends and word of mouth rather than official channels, especially when things went wrong.

Out of the corner of his eye Clint caught Doctor Strange approaching Loki. He didn't hear their short, low voiced conversation, and by the time he moved to see their faces and read their lips, they were done. Strange handed Loki a small plastic canister - a prescription drug? - and he caught Loki's _thank you_ , but that was all.

As Strange moved toward the door, Clint stepped to the side, not enough to be squarely in the other man's way but enough so to get his attention. "What'd you give him?"

Clint found himself under that keen stare that really shouldn't be as unsettling as it was. "I'm sure you're aware, Agent, that I was a doctor of medicine before I became a master of magic. I gave him a painkiller."

The archer's eyebrows shot up in silent query.

"All right, it's not just a painkiller. But it's chemical, not magical. I'm sure you utilize such things in covert actions, as well. It allows one to get on with what needs doing, despite," he flexed his gloved fingers meaningfully, "distractions."

Of course Clint had read Strange's file, which included a certain accident report, and a diagnosis concerning hands that couldn't be healed by known scientific methods. The entire time he was here, Clint hadn't seen him remove his heavy leather gloves. Two and two made four: Strange had been apologizing for making Loki take off a disguise that Strange knew all too well.

Clint remembered a few times he'd swallowed somewhat insane combinations of drugs, legal and illegal, in order to keep functioning on a mission despite exhaustion or injuries. Something cooked up by an actual expert would be a nice change of pace. "Don't suppose I could get a couple of those."

Strange drew a notepad from somewhere deep in his elaborate outfit, scribbled a few words, tore the paper off, and handed it to Clint. "Use sparingly," he said with a thin, hollow smile, and then he was gone. Clint had no idea what the writing said but it looked like pharmaceutical terms so he put it away for later.

Meanwhile, Thor had drawn Loki aside, and this conversation Clint could hear perfectly well.

"I don't like this," Thor was saying.

"Your liking it is irrelevant. Freeing the prisoners removes the Titan's leverage. It must be done, and would be the most advantageous use of my position."

"And what if he knows of this meeting? Or has a fit of temper? If you are imprisoned -"

"My disguise is intact," Loki cut him off. "I said I would do this thing, and I'll not go back on my word."

Thor gripped the smaller man by his shoulders. "You're not allowed to die."

Loki gave him a deeply humoring, twisted smile. "As the king commands."

"I'm serious, Loki. I thought you dead twice now. I will no longer believe it. So don't even consider dying."

"Cease, brother, lest the mortals decide you've lost your wits."

Natasha stepped up to them. "It's almost dawn, boys. I'm guessing it's time to head back before you're missed."

Loki nodded and held up his wrists. "I'm afraid arriving in these would be somewhat conspicuous." There was a half-smile and a light tone that made Clint's fingers twitch again because it was exactly the kind of understatement he and Nat traded when they felt the tension of a mission rising.

The cuffs were complicated, so it took Nat a whole ten seconds to get them off, but off they came. Loki rubbed his hands against each other for a moment, then placed his palms against the front of his shirt and dragged down, as if he was wiping something off his hands. As he did so, the illusion of a perfectly attired and unblemished figure flowed back over his own.

Stark made that frustrated little grunt he always did when he saw magic that he wanted to pin down and study in his lab until he proved it was a trick and he could do it better with technology. Everyone ignored him.

"Thank you. Now, I assume you wish to escort me to the perimeter to ensure I make no detours," Loki said.

"Good, we can skip the lame excuse I came up with," Natasha drawled.

Loki's smile widened as he turned toward the door. "I'm certain it would have been adequately plausible. Until tomorrow's eve, brother."

Clint followed them out, staying two steps behind but alert and watchful. The three of them said nothing as they crossed the driveway and the lawn. The eastern edge of the sky was just beginning to show signs of the eventual sunrise, but Clint found himself focused on sound rather than sight.

Three people walking across a field should normally make some noise. He was used to Natasha's ability to be terrifyingly silent, and she, in turn, had helped him remove the last telltale sounds from his own movement. Loki, whether by skill, magic, or both, didn't add a single noise of his own.

Five steps from the perimeter, Natasha said, "So."

They all stopped, and the dark-haired alien turned to face her.

"What's your angle?" she said, matter-of-fact.

And to Clint's, and he was pretty sure Nat's, surprise, Loki answered her. "Revenge."

"For being tortured?"

"For being used. I am no one's pawn or puppet." The sudden acid in those two words didn't feel like an act.

Nat didn't so much as twitch. "That's it?"

He straightened an invisible crease on an illusionary shirtsleeve. "You have not the lifespan to fathom the pride or honor of beings who live thousands of years. In Asgard, the wrong insult might result in a battle to the death." He paused, then shrugged. "If you believe me bereft of honor, I might suggest that the Mad Titan's treasury is considerable, and I doubt anyone will note a few items vanishing in the chaos that will follow the coming battle."

"Like an Infinity Stone?"

Loki shook his head dismissively. "I never wanted one to begin with. Limitless power, yes, but the damn things have minds of their own and resist all control. I merely opened a doorway and that cursed box leveled an entire compound. Useless."

Clint couldn't argue with that. He remembered Nat telling him about the Mind Gem scepter making people around it irritable even when no one had touched it, and Ultron had happened when Stark poked it. Vision was, well, Vision, but then there were bits of Jarvis and magical lightning and some human in there, too.

Nat seemed to consider his answer as well, and after a moment, she nodded. "Need anything else?"

In response, Loki took a step back, executed an elaborate bow, and vanished from sight.

 

* * *

 

As they walked back, Nat said, "I'm not going to ask if you're okay."

"Good." Because Clint was definitely not okay, but it looked like he was just going to have to deal with that.

"I really wanted to punch him."

"I thought you were going to."

She shook her head.

There were volumes of unspoken communication happening, as there always was between them. It was inevitable when two people fought side by side for so many years in the shadows of spycraft and wetwork.

Natasha didn't have to say why she didn't punch Loki. It wasn't because he was clearly already injured; Clint has seen her do worse to people in worse shape. It was because she was thinking about a rooftop, decades ago, when she had been seen as an asset rather than an enemy.

Clint was thinking about it too. It was impossible not to see the similarities between Loki's cold, closed demeanor and the inscrutable woman whose trust had taken Clint a lifetime to earn. But he was different, too, very different, burning with a cold fire that threatened to scorch the land to ash around it. Clint remembered the way those green eyes had looked when that fire had grown so great it seemed to consume Loki whole.

He thought back to the introductory theology books he'd looked up back when SHIELD first encountered Asgardians. There was a bit about gods having different incarnations or forms that represented their different spheres of influence. One branch of Hinduism believed that the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer were merely three faces of a single being. Did that apply at all here? The Loki who attacked New York was the God of Chaos, an unstoppable force of entropy that would eventually cause the end of world. The Loki they had just seen was Loki the Lie-Smith, the silver-tongued shapeshifter who could trick anyone out of anything.

All this contrast was making his head hurt. Clint filed it away in his brain under Things To Deal With Later and stopped thinking about it.

When they got back to the conference room, the various visitors had departed, leaving only the Avengers. Clearly they'd been waiting for the agents to return, because as soon as they walked in, Tony said, "Are we really doing this?"

"Fighting a crazy ancient alien with a big golden glove? I thought we were pretty clear on that," Clint found himself saying automatically, because humor and deflection were wonderful instincts.

Tony barely spared him a hand-wave. "Mission Impossible Mythology. Secret Agent Alien God. We're all cool with this?"

"My brother will not betray us, Stark. He is aware of the risks and faces them regardless," said Thor.

"Well obviously you're voting yes, you were trying to save him back when he actively slaughtering people."

"He was ill!"

"From torture?" Natasha interrupted, effortlessly redirecting the conversation to suit her needs. "From Thanos?"

"Yes, and more." Thor suddenly realized that he'd said more than he wanted to, and his gaze moved from Nat to sweep across the room. "He would not wish me to say."

"Too bad," Tony quipped.

Thor seemed to have reached that conclusion himself already. "My brother omitted a part of his tale. Before the Mad Titan captured him, his mind was already weakened."

Clint couldn't help but supply the appropriate, "How?" He needed to know.

"There was . . . an accident, during a fight, on Asgard. The fabric of reality was torn. Loki fell through that tear and into the Void beyond." The warrior's face twisted, clearly upset at the mere recollection of events. "It is a place of nothingness. Absence. There is not even darkness, merely the absence of sight. You could not hear yourself scream, or feel the touch of your own hand."

"Full sensory deprivation?" Rhodes asked. "For how long?"

Thor shrugged. "There is no time there. A week at the very least. Possibly months. He was taken halfway across the Universe and emerged from a similar tear which it appears Thanos had been observing."

Clint really couldn't deal with this right now. He was already overloaded with the puzzle he'd seen so far, and this was one puzzle piece too much. So instead he watched the reactions around the room, noting the order of processing. Nat was blank, of course, but Clint knew she was already three trains of thought ahead of everyone else. Bucky had stiffened unmistakably, confirming Clint's suspicion that sense-dep had been part of the Winter Soldier's brainwashing. Stark had a too-tight grip on his coffee cup, but Clint wasn't sure if he was thinking about a cave in the desert or falling from space. Rhodes and Wilson, both modern soldiers, had twitched in a way that meant the words "sensory deprivation" were queuing up memories: Clint wondered if they'd only seen reports, the aftermath, or the real thing. Wanda hadn't had an instinctual reaction but her frown suggested her vivid imagination was helping her out. Vision looked thoughtful as well, but more like Nat than Wanda, thinking and planning. Steve's lack of reaction suggested that sense-dep hadn't been in his WWII training or his time-jump catch-up training.

"That's physically impossible," said Lang, and Clint couldn't quite decipher the emotions in the ex-con's tone. "You couldn't come out of that and not be, I dunno, a gibbering drooling mess for the rest of your life. Your sanity would literally shatter."

"A human would. But you big guys heal pretty quick," Rhodes pointed out. "Can you heal your heads, too? Mental stuff?"

"It takes time and assistance, but yes, we are capable of recovering from mental and physical strains that a mortal could not."

"So what you're saying is that the Loki who attacked Earth was the product of psychological torture followed by physical torture, and what we're seeing now is a return to baseline?" When Thor frowned, Natasha clarified, "This is his normal?"

"Yes. Mostly," Thor amended. "He is still healing, but he is far more now the brother I know than he was when we fought him together."

"PTSD's a bitch," Wilson murmured.

"And how do we know it's not all an act?" Tony said, though the way he asked it suggested he wasn't entirely certain himself.

Finally, Steve spoke. "I don't think it is. When he walked into the room, he was all arrogance and confidence. But when he was asked to drop his illusion, that all vanished. Suddenly he was a wolf in a corner. That didn't feel fake. He put the act back on a little too quickly, too. He wouldn't be so defensive if that was a show for us. And we've seen with Thor, it takes a lot to make you guys look that beat up."

Thor nodded and Stark harrumphed.

It was Vision who laid the whole thing out in plain terms. "Thanos is a being of immense power who has had years to lay his plans. The opportunity to empty his prisons of all those he has captured, for their knowledge or their leverage, is too valuable to ignore. There will be a significant number of Avengers involved in the operation who can monitor for potential traps. If all goes according to plan, then we know Loki is more concerned with stopping Thanos than fighting with us. And we can proceed from there."

Tony sighed. "I just love it when you do that inarguable third-grade logic thing," he said in a tone that suggested he really didn't love it but was at least resigned to it.

And then, to Clint's complete surprise, Steve looked at him. "Are you okay with that, Barton?"

Suddenly the whole room's focus was on him, and Clint hated that, so he focused on the part where Captain America had just asked him if he was okay with it like they would maybe drop the whole thing if he said no. Not Tony, not Nat, not Bucky, him, Clint, because of everyone in the room he was the only one who'd had Loki in his actual goddamn brain fucking him up from the inside out.

"Um. Yeah?" he managed, and now that it was spoken, he realized that yeah, he was okay with it. "Yeah. Like Vision said, the prison break is the important thing. If we get through this mess and he hasn't fucked with us, I'd say that earns him a second chance."

He was aware of Natasha in particular looking at him, because he knew what she was thinking. He was deeply grateful that neither Fury nor Coulson was here, because he knew exactly what they would say, and it would involve unkind things about lost causes, and then Nat would get upset. But the rest of SHIELD wasn't here, so yeah, it was okay.

Or at least he'd keep telling himself that it was okay, and eventually it would be. Clint could do that.


	2. Some Are Silk and Some Are Leather

The plan, ultimately, was simple. Clint liked simple, because simple plans were the easiest to fix when everything went to shit.

It followed what Clint had long ago nicknamed a stealth-speed-scream progression. Part one was stealth, breaking into the prison while attracting as little attention as possible. Once they'd found the prisoners, they'd get to part two, speed, where some stealth was abandoned to move the prisoners as quickly as possible. When their cover eventually got blown, part three kicked in. The more screaming, flashing chaos they could create, the more they could confuse their numbers. Guards, especially in a prison, were much less likely to try to intervene with a break-in if they thought they were outflanked and outnumbered.

The first part went off without a hitch, even though it looked utterly bizarre to Clint's human senses. When pressed for a simplified explanation, Strange had said simply, "I'm going to knock on the door. Loki will show me where to open the door, and when I open it, we'll put big doorstoppers on both sides."

"Probably a little too oversimplified," Steve admitted, but at least that made more sense than trying to decipher the chalked runes, melting candles, and other oddities that had been arranged at one end of an empty hanger bay.

Whatever it was, it seemed to work well enough. The door opened into a dark, narrow space that was unmistakably a prison cell. When Steve stepped through, a figure melted out of the darkness. Silently, Loki gestured for Steve to grab one side of the cell door, while he took the other, and the entire door slid silently out of its frame. They set it down as quietly as possible and the stealth party funneled out into the corridor, the two magic-users remaining behind to maintain the portal.

Clint had to admit, it was a little cool to be on an alien spaceship. There weren't any windows to prove it, but his senses were sharp enough that he noticed a slight shift in the pull of gravity when he stepped through the magical doorway. The prison was tight and crowded, and all kinds of crazy pipes and wires were running along the walls and ceiling. His excitement diminished when he realized that the dim light was concealing a significant amount of filth and grime. They were getting close to part two now, so he picked up his pace.

It didn't take long for them to find prisoners. No one reacted to English (or any of the other Earth-based languages Nat tried), but the language of someone unlocking your cell and silently gesturing down the corridor was fairly universal. In the dim light, Clint couldn't tell how humanoid the prisoners were, but growing up in a circus had taught him not to judge or stare at physical appearances. Barnes kept an eye on their surroundings, allowing Clint to focus on opening locks as quietly as possible. The soft clank of Steve's boots on the catwalk below told him that Cap and Nat were similarly engaged, and the shuffle of feet from the opposite direction told him that the other teams were hard at work, as well.

Part two didn't last long, because it never did. When the distant toll of an alarm bell echoed through the corridors, Clint turned to Barnes and nodded. "Your turn." With one of his strange, curled expressions, Barnes moved down the corridor and began simply ripping locks apart with his metal hand. Within half a minute the ship was filled with a cacophony of sound as the various heroes ripped, blasted, and kicked in doors, locks, and control panels.

Clint's eyes had adjusted to the dim light by the time the guards showed up, so he spent a few extremely cathartic minutes filling alien guards with arrows as the chaos escalated around him.

And then his ears popped and a rush of air nearly knocked him over and he started cursing because of course someone had blown a hole in the goddamn spaceship.

A smaller alien nearly flew past him. He snatched it out of the air and pressed it into the hands of a much larger, bulkier alien who seemed to be doing just fine. That had been the last cell in this corridor, so Clint kept to the end of the line, shooting down the stray guard who was somehow doing just fine in the increasingly howling wind. As he approached the cell with the portal he caught sight of Thor, Steve, and several other of the wide-shouldered types anchoring smaller prisoners and ushering them through the cell door.

"Go!" Steve shouted when he saw Clint, and Clint didn't argue or pretend he was fine. He was barely moving under his own power in the wind force. He realized abruptly that there must be multiple holes in the ship, and the reason there was still any air at all was because it was being sucked from Earth through the magical doorway. Logic and physics said that the door should be impassable, nothing but a wall of wind, but it wasn't.

When he'd made it through the portal and turned around to help the next person through, he realized why. The mages had been making changes to their spell on the fly, and apparently changes on the fly required blood, because they each had nearly identical self-induced knife wounds and were dripping onto their runes.

Clint didn't have time to think, just joined the bucket line that was carrying people instead of water through to the safety of Earth, eventually helping to drag the heroes themselves through the increasing pressure.

Thor was at the very end. At first he refused to go through without his brother. Clint could hear Loki and Strange screaming over the wind, reminding the thunder god that Loki couldn't drop the spell on his end until he was the last one left. So Thor came through, hovering on the Earth side of the portal, and it was just Loki.

There was the sound of an explosion, muffled through the roaring wind, and suddenly the vacuum effect tripled, spell alterations apparently useless. Everyone within eighty feet of the portal was bowled over. Clint reacted on instinct, firing a grappling arrow at one of the massive steel beams supporting the hanger roof. As it looped around and caught, he held on to the line with one hand and grabbed Lang, who had just lost his own grip and was about to fly past.

Out of the corner of his eye, Clint saw that Loki had only been kept from blowing away because Thor had reached back through the portal to grab his hand. They were shouting over the wind, words that Clint didn't have time to make out.

And then Thor was pushed back into the hanger, the portal vanished, and the howling wind stopped.

 

* * *

 

Things were really, really, REALLY not okay.

Technically the general battle plan was on track. Once the prisoners were freed and confirmation of that spread through various networks, Thanos' legions and plans began to fragment. Only a few truly loyal groups were still with him. In battles large and small across the globe, the invasion was being pushed back, or at the very least, the lines were holding. Thor was upset, but focused. Clint refused to think about Loki and focused on the war.

And then the bastard took Tony in a trap that Clint had to admit was disgustingly clever.

None of the Avengers wanted to rest. Suddenly it didn't matter that Tony's stubbornness and genius had gotten them into trouble more than once. He was still Tony Stark and his absence was like a great big hole in the world. So Clint, like everyone else, pushed himself and pushed himself for two days until Nat told him to go to sleep before she kicked him in the head (again).

Clint didn't normally dream when he was this exhausted, and he'd never gotten the hang of lucid dreaming, so he knew something was weird from the start. Also, the aurora-colored road running through the vastness of space lit by a million intensely shining stars was definitely not the kind of imagery Clint's subconscious usually provided. He was standing on said road, at the perfect vantage point to observe a massive nebula of stars and planets that looked oddly like a tree.

"Finally." Clint turned and okay, Loki, this was more familiar. Loki frequented his nightmares a lot. Although in his nightmares the alien prince usually looked more cruel and crazed, and this Loki looked a lot more like the one he'd seen in the conference room almost a week ago. Also he looked worried and kind of impatient. And there was a significant lack of death or destruction or the blue of mind-control. So, all in all, still a really weird dream.

And then it got weirder.

"Mark what I will show you with the greatest care, Agent. I will not be able to dream-walk again." Loki reached out to the stars and pulled something Clint couldn't see. The stars blurred around them like an old sci-fi warp speed effect. When the world stopped moving around them, they were standing in the prison ship. The light was slightly worse than the last time Clint had been here, and it was empty of prisoners.

Mostly. Clint turned around and saw Stark chained up in a cell. There were clear signs of injuries, and the inventor was unconscious, but he was also alive. Instinctively, Clint's hands went to the cell door, but they passed straight through it. Right, he was dreaming. This wasn't real.

"The ship has moved, but I know not where. I will show you what I can." Loki gestured again and the cell block warped out on them. Outside the ship, Clint realized what Loki meant. The ship wasn't hovering the depths of space anymore. It was, very clearly, underwater. From this angle he could see a number of large holes that had been hastily patched and a massive gap in the hull that seemed to be covered by some kind of force field while it was repaired from the inside.

Another warp transition, and at first Clint didn't know what he was looking at, a white wall full of black lines, but he tried to commit it to memory just the same, in case this crazy dream was really some kind of communication. About halfway through his careful inspection he realized it looked a bit like a topography map of a plain at the base of a really large mountain, except no, reorient, not a mountain, a shoreline, and the seabed beyond. Which meant that the small narrow thing over there was the ship. He got the feeling Loki had seen the image but not close enough or for long enough to focus on labels or a map key. Fortunately, as an agent, Clint had a lot of practice and training in rapid memorization, so he committed the lines to memory as best he could and then everything warped again.

This time, however, they landed in Clint's own kitchen. The combination of Loki, beat up or not, standing in his kitchen in his house with his family possibly just out of sight made Clint's stomach roll and his fingers reach for a bow that wasn't there. This. This was his nightmares. A decade later, Loki still remembered Clint's secrets and could use them as he wished.

Oddly, Loki's expression seemed understanding.

"I apologize, Agent, but of the two I could reach, my brother was too obvious. His mind might be searched." Seemingly out of nowhere he produced a large wooden box covered in carven runes. "And symbolism is important in dreams." Loki lifted several tiles from the kitchen floor as if they'd never been mortared down, revealing a space that shouldn't exist under the floor, and placed the box in it before replacing the tiles. "I would not suggest opening that. Should I perish, it will remove itself."

Then they were back on the aurora road again. For a moment, Loki looked like he wanted to say something more, but then he turned and began walking along the path, and Clint woke up.

 

* * *

 

The next few hours were a blur of people, questions, and images. Clint thanked every lucky star he had for the careful, patient way Wanda helped him with the barest touch of her powers, focusing his memory and keeping the images clear and fresh as he sketched them and compared it to uncountable miles of coastline.

Ironically, Clint never missed Tony more. Everyone was looking at him with worry or concern or pity. The Avengers were walking on eggshells. He needed Tony there to crack jokes, to give Clint something to focus on besides fear and uncertainty. Tony would probably whistle "Once Upon a Dream" until Natasha elbowed him in the gut and pretended it was an accident. Maybe he still would, once they found him. Clint held on to that thought.

Wanda could tell there was something strange in his mind, but her power was wild and untrained, as Strange commented when he showed up. "When this is all over, remind me to take you to Tibet," the doctor said to her. "I have to check with a few people first, but I doubt they'll say no." Wanda seemed apprehensive, but Clint hoped she'd take him up on it. She needed some time around people who understood her and appreciated her abilities instead of pointing her like a weapon.

For now, Strange sat Clint down in a chair and told him to close his eyes. Even though he couldn't see what was happening, there was that feeling in the air that Clint was learning to identify as supernatural power. Whatever Strange did, when he told Clint he could open his eyes, the air around them was filled with what looked like glowing orange runes. Except for right in front of him, where in the middle of a number of runes there hung the green outline of a box.

Strange gave a short, low whistle. "That's . . . clever, actually, really clever."

"What is it?" Wanda asked before Clint could.

"It's information. I'm pretty sure it's from his memories."

Clint's fingers clenched suddenly around the arms of his chair. "He put his brain in my head?"

"What? No, no," Strange shook his head. "That's the beauty of it. A whole personality, or a lifetime of memories, especially what that lifetime is measured in centuries, that would be a huge amount of energy. Not to mention that ripping it out would be dangerous and the body left behind would be defenseless. No, this is just the data points. All the emotions, all the context, that's still in his head. He'd still react instinctively to friend or foe. But if you asked him for someone's name, or where they lived, or any other fact, he wouldn't be able to tell you because it's all in here."

"In my head," Clint repeated, but he was already following the logical path of deduction. It was obvious to anyone who'd ever been behind enemy lines. "So he's probably being interrogated."

"That would make sense. In this state, he'd still react, it wouldn't appear that he'd done anything to himself, but he literally couldn't tell anyone anything."

Clint sighed. "And I'm guessing you can't take it out of my head."

Strange frowned. "It would be risky. This isn't my spell and I'm not familiar with this kind of magic. If the box breaks, you'll have a thousand years of someone else's knowledge in your head, and that could drive you insane."

"Why me?" Clint groaned rhetorically, but Strange answered him anyway.

"Any kind of magic is easier when you have a connection to the other person. Since he's been in your mind before, you were probably the easiest to contact. Plus, if you were captured, I doubt anyone would guess that there's anything unusual hidden in your mind."

"You're just a guy with a bow," said Wanda with a teasing grin. When Clint's expression didn't change, she added, "It's a good thing, now. You have no obvious secrets our enemy would want to know."

Clint was not going to think about how he didn't belong in this lineup of superheroes. That could wait until they rescued Tony. Maybe until after they beat down Thanos. Maybe longer than that.

 

* * *

 

This time, the rescue mission was going to be a lot harder.

For one, Strange couldn't get them in via portal. Something about wards and needing someone on the inside to break through the other end. He also seemed doubtful that, if they found Loki and he was in any shape to cast magic, he would be able to open a portal on the fly. So they'd travel from point A to point B the old-fashioned way.

The other big hitch was that, since the ship was on Earth, there was more chance of getting jumped by Thanos or his army on the way in or out. So most of the heavy hitters would be off creating a big, violent, messy distraction that would hopefully also take out some key targets but mostly take the attention off a quite break-in.

The third problem was that the ship was underwater. All Natasha had to do was murmur, "This is just like Gallipoli," and Clint and everyone else from SHIELD started making adamant arguments that it would be better to get the whole ship to the surface and not risk being trapped at the bottom of the ocean. Clint had done the Das Boot thing, and he'd like to not do that ever again.

He was also hoping that he could be on Team Ship Takeover, but Wanda had gently pointed out that, if Loki couldn't remember anyone specifically, he might not be cooperative. Clint had fought him but also temporarily had been on the same team. It was clear on her face that she hadn't wanted to say that, to remind Clint once again of a shitty, painful memory, but Clint knew she had a good point.

At least this way he'd be on Team Get Tony. He desperately needed that inappropriate levity back where it belonged, keeping Clint's little inner voices distracted and quiet.

Which was how, eight hours later, he was once again creeping through the dark-lit hallways of the repurposed prison ship. Stealth-speed-scream, he thought to himself, only this time it was Natasha's team that would be doing the screaming as they took control of the ship.

The brief glimpse of a cell had given no indication of where, in the massive cellblocks, to specifically look. Clint could have ordered them to split up, but since it was just the three of them and the ship was likely full of guards, he didn't want to take that chance. In front of him was one of the Defenders, a guy in an honest-to-god devil outfit but who could apparently see perfectly well in the dark, so Clint was biting back costume commentary. Bucky was just behind him, heavily armed but still walking with the lack of noise that came with intensive training.

The demon guy, who went by Daredevil (Clint was biting his tongue hard enough to hurt), suddenly stopped. "One floor down. Take the ladder to the right. Five cells forward," he murmured.

"Which one?" Clint had to ask.

"Not human," was the reply, and Clint swallowed a sigh. Of course they'd find Loki first, that was his kind of luck.

The cell indicated wasn't the bars-and-sliding-doors kind, but the kind with solid metal and a food slot. It also had a big, serious lock. Clint did a quick overview. "I don't know if I have the tools to get this open quietly." He glanced at the red guy. "You've got super-senses, right?"

Daredevil smiled. "Kind of."

"Can you listen to the lock? Like a stethoscope?"

It turned out his hearing was exponentially better than any lock-breaking sensor Clint had ever used. He got the lock open in forty-five seconds. "You passed up a great career as a safecraker," he quipped as he slowly swung the door open.

All joking quickly died when they saw the occupant within. Loki looked even worse than before, if that was possible. He hung from the ceiling by his wrists with his toes just touching the floor, though on closer inspection, Clint realized that it wasn't just the wrists. The cord, some kind of metal rope that was glowing slightly, had been looped and knotted in a manner similar to what Clint had seen once too often on Earth. It was a kind of strangulation torture: weight rested on the wrists but also on a tightening loop around the neck, so that unless the subject stood on their toes, their air would be restricted or even cut off. But the strain of standing on one's toes and keeping one's hands held high in the air was intense, so eventually the subject would weaken and, essentially, choke themselves.

Well. That explained the bruising they'd seen before.

"Loki," Clint whispered several times in increasing volume, with no response. "Bucky," Clint said instead. Fortunately he didn't have to explain torture methods to the former assassin. Bucky looped his arms around the prisoner and carefully lifted him up, giving the line enough slack for Clint to untie it from the ceiling, and then from around Loki's wrists and neck.

When it was completely removed, the glow faded and Loki stirred. Magic, Clint figured. "Loki?"

Eyes opened. Loki coughed, then clapped his hand over his mouth instinctively to muffle his coughing. With his other hand he pushed at Bucky's arms, so the soldier let go, and while Loki swayed, surprisingly, he did stay standing. Clint uncapped a water flask and held it out. When half of it was gone, Loki handed it back, no longer coughing. Instead he was watching them carefully.

"You are not foe," he said in a hoarse whisper. "But not friend, I believe."

"It's an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of thing," Clint found himself saying, then mentally slapped himself. He was supposed to be convincing the man to cooperate. "I've got your stuff in my head."

Loki frowned, but then nodded. "Then I must at the very least trust you in this escape."

"Can you walk?" Clint asked.

Loki gave him a tight smile. "If we are escaping this prison, I can do more than walk."

That should have been physically impossible given what they'd just seen, but Clint wasn't going to get into an argument about alien physiologies. He had different priorities. "There's another prisoner here, a man, human, brown hair -"

"And an inability to cease speaking?"

Clint smiled. "That one." If Tony was still babbling, that was a very good sign.

"I believe I know where he is." Loki moved toward the door where Daredevil had been keeping watch. "This way."

They moved deeper into the ship, four silent shadows on thin catwalks. After a minute, the muffled echoes of banging and violence began to reverberate through the pipes around them, and then a familiar alarm went off. The other team was right on time, but now Clint's group had to hurry. With things having moved from stealth right to scream, they ran down one corridor and two sets of stairs without caring about the noise they made.

Half a dozen guards were attempting to come up the stairs at the same time, but between Hawkeye, Daredevil, and the Winter Soldier, six grunts were barely a speedbump on their way down.

Clint was definitely grateful that they'd found Loki, however, because he realized at the third turn that the ship was considerably bigger than anyone had realized and that trying to find Stark on their own would have taken hours. They'd long since left the cellblocks and the rooms they passed now were full of dark, disturbing shapes. Clint decided he didn't want to know what this part of the ship had been used for. If Loki hadn't opened a portal in the center of the cellblock area during the first break-in, Clint doubted they could have gotten all the prisoners safely through this maze.

Finally Loki led them to another securely locked door. Clint glanced at the lock, considered the time it would take to pick, and gestured at Bucky instead. Three swings of a solid metal fist bent the door and frame enough to render the lock useless.

Clint had braced himself this time but still shivered at the sight of Tony Stark, the most confident man on Earth, torn and bloody and horribly vulnerable. He was secured to a heavy metal table by multiple cuffs and chains and bolts and locks. Even smashing half of them open by force, it felt like freeing Tony took far too long. There was a pulse and breath, and no visible permanent injuries, but no sign of returning to consciousness, so Bucky simply picked him up in a fireman's carry.

"What now?" Loki asked.

"Up. The others are trying to bring this ship to the surface. We just have to get to a top-facing exit," Clint explained.

Loki frowned for a moment, then nodded. "The quickest path will have the most guards," he warned.

"Fine with me," Clint said. He was itching to put a few arrows in these bastards.

There were a lot of stairs between them and the top. Guards popped up more and more often, and now they were playing defense, trying to shield Tony from harm, which put all of them, especially Bucky, at a disadvantage.

They'd been cornered in a stairwell with enemies above and below when Loki spoke again. "I know we are not allies, but we must move faster." Before Clint could ask what that meant, Loki had knelt down and retrieved daggers from two fallen guards.

Clint felt his blood go cold. Without needing to think, he notched an arrow and took aim -

The pale figure had already swung himself over the bannister. Dashing back up the stairs put him behind the guards below Clint. There was the flash of a blade and two of the three shooters were down, giving Clint the opportunity to shoot the last one with the arrow he'd already drawn. Daredevil was already taking advantage of the opening and running forward to engage the guards above. It was over in less than a minute.

When Loki rejoined them, he handed Clint several arrow shafts. "Your magical quiver reuses these, yes?"

Clint didn't draw a second arrow on Loki. Fear for Tony (for all of them, really) overrode his increasingly muddled feelings about their former adversary. Another competent fighter meant they'd get out of there that much faster, and they did. Even though he looked like Clint could knock him over with a feather, Loki managed to do as much damage as any of them to the guards that remained in their way.

They were almost at the top when the ship rocked suddenly. "We've surfaced," said Bucky, who had clearly been on more submersibles than the rest of them.

"We're almost there," Loki replied. He was right: thirty seconds later they were climbing into what had once been an airlock, with an outer hatch above them.

Clint glanced at the control panel. "This is definitely not English."

Loki examined it carefully, then flipped a lever. "That was the power, I believe." The hatch was still closed.

Clint was about to start pushing buttons randomly when Daredevil placed his hand against the wall. "The way this ship works, would power be hot or cold?"

"Cold," Loki supplied.

Red gloved hands followed an invisible path along the metal wall that ended at a wheel on one side of the control panel. "That one."

It turned only a fraction before the horrible sound of grinding metal filled the airlock. "It's rusted shut," Bucky said as he examined the doors. "I don't think anyone's used this since the ship hit the water." He put Stark down and tried to pry it open himself, but he had no leverage, no gap between the door and the wall.

Clint's mind raced. They couldn't fail now, not when they had Tony and they were so tantalizingly close to fresh air. He ran his remaining trick arrowheads through his mind, trying to come up with a solution. "Where're the A-listers when you need to smash things?" he muttered, because it was the kind of thing Tony might say, and he felt a little cheered when Bucky gave him a half-grin.

Loki was staring at the controls, frowning. "I can open it," he said. Then he looked at Clint. "But it will require the magic I am using to remain conscious and mobile."

Oh. That explained some things. "We're not going to leave you behind," he replied to the unspoken fear. "Your brother would kill me." But that really wasn't it, anymore. Even if Thor wouldn't knock his head off, Clint knew, instinctively, that he wasn't going to leave Loki behind. And he really, really didn't want to think about that right now.

He didn't have to. Whether or not Loki remembered his brother, or trusted Clint, or was following blind instinct, he seemed satisfied with Clint's words. He placed his hands on the wheel, which glowed green and spun rapidly, forcing the hatch open with an earsplitting shriek of metal. Then he dropped like a stone. Forewarned, Clint caught him before he hit the floor.

Five people emerged into the sunlight, and then the Quinjet was there, and Natasha and the others, and Clint could stop thinking and curl up on a bench and let his mind go blissfully blank while the rescued prisoners became other people's problems.

 

* * *

 

Clint had a whole five days to not think about Loki. The war with Thanos came to its inevitable climax. The assembled heroes of Earth and the universe saved the day. Then Clint slept for about sixteen hours.

Natasha was there when he woke up.

"You don't have to come," Clint said, but he already knew she would, so they walked together out of the Avengers barracks and across the lawn to the main building and the medical wing.

Thor was there, of course. When he hadn't been needed out in the field he'd been watching over his brother. Loki had only woken up after Thanos' defeat, and while his expression was still wary, the smile on Thor's face told Clint that Loki's instinctive reaction to his adopted brother had given the big guy reason to be hopeful about their relationship.

Still, it was bizarre, seeing that pale, angled face consider the two SHIELD agents with wary curiosity.

For a moment, Clint actually wanted to lie. Say that something had happened and they couldn't give him back his memories. Because damnit, without all the history, without the mistrust and the atrocities, Loki was . . .

No. Not thinking. No thinking. "Okay," he said. "Do what you gotta do."

Loki stood smoothly and crossed the room. Two cool fingertips pressed against Clint's temples. A vision of his kitchen flashed through his mind and there was the briefest sensation of an inch inside his brain. Then Loki stepped back, green eyes blinking and widening and Clint ran.

Well, he only ran into the empty room on the other side of the hall. But yeah, he ran.

Natasha followed him, of course, and closed the door behind them, and said, "You want to talk about it?" and it wasn't really a suggestion because she was using her you-have-to-talk-about-it tone.

"I just didn't want to see that," Clint said uselessly. "Damnit."

"Didn't want to see what?" Oh, she was going to make him say it.

"I can't . . ." Clint swallowed hard. "There's the guy in my nightmares, the god with a scepter leading an army out of the sky, and I hate him, I'm fucking terrified of him. And there's the guy who went undercover and got tortured for intel and two prison breaks, who's smart and efficient and defensive but it's just like . . ."

"Me," Nat said, with no trace of self-loathing. She's clearly been thinking about this as well. "Or Wanda. Bucky. Even Lang."

"I know, I know, me and my damn lost causes, right?" Clint laughed, shaky and uncertain.

"You're good at that. You see people and you don't see what they've done. You see how they're hurting. What they went through to get to where they are." If it had been someone else, Clint would have scoffed, but he and Nat didn't bullshit each other. If she said something to him it was because she meant it. "Don't be mad at yourself for that."

"But I can't deal with this, Nat!" Clint pointed at the door. "I can't forgive him."

"No one's saying you have to."

"But I want to. In my head. But I can't." Clint knew he wasn't making any sense, but fortunately Nat was fluent in Clint.

"Listen to me," she said, walking up to him. "You are a good person. Shut up, no, you are," she cut him off before he could protest. "Hating people isn't what you do. That's why it hurts so much." She tapped him on the chest over his heart. "You don't have to forgive him. You don't have to stop being scared. You've been through too much. But you don't have to hate him, either."

Clint fought against that idea instinctively: how could he not hate Loki after all that had happened? But once he asked the question, he answered it.

Nat was right. He didn't hate easily. And now that he'd seen the other side of the man, someone with whom he could not only sympathize but also empathize, understanding and relating to and even relying on in a fight, he couldn't hold on to hate.

He took a deep breath. "I hate being a good guy."

"No you don't," Natasha said, and she was right. "We should check back in on them."

"Yeah, we should," Clint admitted.

In the other room, Thor was standing hesitantly on one side of the room, looking very much like he wanted to reach out to his adopted brother but feared the gesture wouldn't be appreciated. Loki stood on the other side, eyes fixed far into the distance.

Clint had expected that, with his knowledge returned, Loki would put on that mask again, the literal illusion as well as the arrogance and cold superiority. He certainly looked more confident and collected than he had only minutes ago, but when his gaze snapped to Clint and Nat, he didn't smirk or sneer.

"Agent Barton," he said, and Clint honestly didn't know what to read in Loki's tone of voice. "I entered your mind without permission. Where I hail from, this is considered inexcusable."

That was about a hundred light-years away from anything Clint had been expecting. "Um. Well. I get why."

"I had hoped you would. Still. You kept safe my memory box. Moreover you had ample opportunity to repay me for my prior actions toward you, and instead you aided in my rescue. I am not so stripped of honor that I would ignore this." He seemed to stand a little straighter, looked Clint in the eye, and said, "If there is something in my power to give to you in gratitude, you need but name it."

Clint stared for a good ten seconds in surprise and disbelief. He saw Thor about to speak, but Natasha must have given him a look or gesture from the doorway, because he closed his mouth again.

"Okay," Clint said finally. Revenge had crossed his mind but then crossed right out of it again. Nothing was going to fix what had happened in the past, but there was one thing from that nightmare that Clint could change. "Everything you got from my head, when you were in it. I want you to put it in a box and then throw away the box and the key. Or smash it. Whatever will make it gone."

Loki blinked several times. "This could be done. I would not be able to remove everything, but I can certainly destroy everything I could not have learned without entering your mind. You are aware that I will not be able to prove to you what I have done?"

Clint nodded. "You said this is about honor. Wouldn't be very honorable if you lied."

Loki gave him a thin smile, but there was no malice behind it, only a sort of tiredness. "I require a container of thin crystal or glass. It need not be large."

Nat turned back into the corridor. "One minute." While she ran off, Loki sat on the bed and closed his eyes in concentration. She returned in less than the promised minute with a glass vial and a rubber stopper she'd probably gotten from the medical lab down the hall.

Loki held his hand out without opening his eyes, so Natasha placed both vial and stopper in it. A few seconds later, the vial began to glow, filling itself with what Clint could only describe as a blue-green cloud. It took about fifteen seconds to completely fill the vial, at which point Loki quickly inserted the stopper and twisted it down to seal. The vial stopped glowing, but the cloud remained.

He opened his eyes and stood, also bringing up with him the thin hospital pillow. With a flick he removed the pillow itself from its case and dropped the vial into the white cloth pouch. Then he took hold of the cloth, and the vial inside, in both hands, and snapped it in two.

Clint quickly realized that the cloth wasn't just to hold the broken glass: it blackened as if it had been set on fire and emitted a strong green smoke. As the smoke dissipated, Clint thought he heard a snatch of a voice pass his ears, but then it cleared completely and he wasn't sure if he'd just imagined the sound.

Loki tossed the burnt bundle into the trash. "It is done."

It felt like a weight Clint had forgotten he was carrying dissipated with the smoke. He'd had Loki in his head twice now, but there was nothing left to prove it. His secrets were his own again. He couldn't betray anyone any more than he already had.

And, wow, Clint had done that. He'd done the right thing, and then gotten Loki to do the right thing. He felt . . . heroic.

"Cool," he said out loud, and held out his hand.

And after a moment, Loki took it.

**Author's Note:**

> This whole thing was written in about two days, so if there are still errors let me know and I'll fix. Ragnarok just kind of flipped a switch and I've been in a writing daze. Also that's probably why the second part is more disjointed.
> 
> I really didn't want to write up a whole Infinity War, especially since there's already a freaking leaked trailer for it so all of this will become AU in, what, a year? But I figured, with the sheer size of everything that has to fit into Infinity War, there might not be enough room for arcs for my two favorite characters at all, much less what I'd like them to have.
> 
> Also, I felt really awkward doing tags for this, so if anyone has suggestions for how I could make the tags better I'd appreciate it. I didn't want to clutter up the tags with the entire MCU roster because I know how annoyed I get when I'm searching for a specific character and I get massive ensemble fics, so I tried to stick to characters who get at least a little bit of spotlight.


End file.
